Falling Under (26 page)
Under my face, Hugo’s T-shirt is damp with my tears. He is still holding me tight and his hand is rubbing my back in warm, slow circles. I didn’t realize I was crying.
“Sorry,” I whisper.
“Shh,” he says. “It’s okay.” “People do this,” I say. “Do what?”
“People manage to do it all the time, right?” “Um.. .”
“I want to know,” I say, “is it safe?” He keeps rocking.
“Is what safe?”
“Is it... would it be safe . . .” My voice is now nearly inaudible, but I continue speaking into his neck. “Will it ever feel safe to love you?”
He stops moving, stops breathing even, just for a mo- ment. Then he continues the rocking, holding my body still closer to his.
“I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t know if love is... sup- posed to feel safe.”
“That sucks.”
“Maybe. If we’re in it though, if we’re in love,” he contin- ues, “we’re equally unsafe. Maybe there’s a safety in that.”
“Maybe.”
He pulls his head back and cradles my face in his hands. “I’ll love you the best I can,” he says, and there are tears
in his eyes. “That I can promise.”
I swallow the lump in my throat and nod. “Okay. Me too,” I say.
He kisses me.
And the lips kissing him back are mine, fully, willingly mine. And a sliver of relief slides in. We move our lips slowly, touching each other with our faces—cheeks, noses,
chins, eyelashes. I am finally wanting, and thinking about us naked on the dining room floor when the buzzer goes off on the stove and the dog starts howling.
We laugh and kiss one more time and go to retrieve our dinner.
I have retrieved myself, at least for the moment.
6
Life as a so-called normal person includes dinners out and political discussion and double-dating with Bernadette and Faith.
Double-dating with Bernadette and Faith includes witnessing them fight and being asked to take sides in their ongoing personal/political dispute about Faith coming out to her family and Bernadette coming out at work.
We are deep in the west end, in a funky underground restaurant where no one from Faith’s family would venture. It’s dark and features wild paintings of orgies on the walls and sparkling 50s vinyl benches. Ani DiFranco plays on the sound system and Bernadette’s hands and arms move in punctuation to the dialogue.
And then...
Then there is Erik. Where he should not be.
Erik, who should exist inside his apartment and nowhere else.
Of course he must go out. He must have a life apart from what I see, but I’ve never imagined it.
And now here he is, loose on the streets of Toronto, loose in the same bar as me and my new, normal life. Here he is at the next table, staring at me, witnessing me in my escape
from who I really am, and from what I, what we, have done together.
Erik, Erik, Erik. Where he should not be.
6
A few words, alone in a classroom...
“I’m not free,” you say, your first words ever to him as he lets his eyes rest on you, his message clear. “Not really, not for... not to.. .”
“Everyone is free,” he says. “Yes, but.. .”
“Don’t bore me with boyfriends or guilt or bullshit justi- fications,” he says. “I don’t give a rat’s ass.”
“Okay.”
“I’ve seen you looking at me.”
“I’m supposed to look at you,” you say, “I’ve been draw- ing you.”
“You’re not drawing me now.”
“No,” you say, with too much hot, fast liquid pulsing through your veins. “No, I’m not.”
The classroom door locks so easily.
And then you feel alive, really alive, for the first time in so long. Your locked-up self slides free and wants to put aside future and love and responsibility. She wants the eyes and hands of a strange man on her, wants to let the clothing fall off of her.
You let her.
And you let Erik into your breath, into your blood and bones, into you. Where he should not be.
6
My fingertips are cold and I have lost track of the conver- sation. Faith is looking at me, waiting for a response.
“I’m sorry,” I say, blinking. “Excuse me, I have to . . .” I gesture toward the back of the bar and stand up.
“You okay?” Hugo asks.
I give him what I hope is a bright smile. “Perfect,” I say, and start walking.
There are stairs, and before I’m down them I hear another pair of feet descending. At the bottom, with my feet safely on the orange-painted concrete, I turn to meet him.
For a moment we stand looking at each other, two or three feet of air and space between us. He seems even bigger, takes up more space than I remember.
I swallow. “Hello,” Erik says.
I cross my arms over my chest and try to slow my breathing.
“Hello,” I say.
“It all makes sense now,” he says. “But you forgot to mention your new boyfriend. He is new, isn’t he?”
“Yes.”
He exhales. “Well, that’s good. If you’re happy.. .” “So far.”
“Good,” he says, and looks away. “Uh, how are you?” I ask.
“Fucking great,” he says. “Thanks for asking. You take care.”
He moves past me toward the door to the men’s room. In the second he is brushing by, the scent of him hits me— sandalwood, Scotch, sex, pot—and my mind is filled with a hundred, thousand, million moments of us naked, burning, hurtling toward each other and colliding with sweet, sicken- ing, bottomless need.
“Erik,” I call after him, my voice strangled by memory. He freezes, his back still to me.
“Don’t,” he says.
“Don’t what?”
He comes back to stand in front of me, too close to be casual, should anyone be looking. I glance up the stairs. His hand reaches up, touches my cheek and I don’t stop him, then he closes the distance between us until we are pressed together, hip to hip, chest to chest.
I take a step back and run into the wall.
His hand whips up to grab the back of my head, he yanks me forward and presses his mouth to mine. I sink into the deep, painful pleasure that is Erik.
After a couple of seconds I push him away, but I’ve let it happen and we both know it.
“Damn it,” I say. He laughs as he backs off. “Bye, Mara.”
“Good-bye.”
He moves toward the stairs.
“Oh,” he says, pausing with a foot on the first step. “Yes?”
“He doesn’t have a brother, does he?” Erik asks. “What?”
“Your new guy. I hope he doesn’t have a—”
“You bastard,” I say.
And then he’s taking the stairs up, two at a time, and all the strength has gone from my legs and I’m sliding down the wall and sitting, crumpled on the cold, dirty floor.
“I didn’t know,” I whisper, alone in the hallway. “I didn’t know.”
Not that that’s given me a second of comfort.
Bernadette finds me at the bottom of the stairs and drags me into the women’s bathroom.
“Okay, what is it?” “Erik,” I say in a whisper. “Here?”
I nod.
Bernadette puts her arms around me and hugs me hard. “Holy shit,” she says.
But Bernadette doesn’t really know. She knows about Erik, though she’s never met him, but she doesn’t know I ever went back to him after Lucas died. That part is my own burden, and far too difficult to explain, even to Bernadette.
She makes me splash cold water on my face and put on lipstick. I’m paler than usual and my hair is plastered to my head.
“I look like shit.”
“You’re fine,” she says. “Come on, this doesn’t have to be a big deal, right?”
“Right.”
“If he’s still there, you just ignore him,” she says. “Okay.”
“Either way, we’ll get the bill and leave.” “All right.”
She frowns. “He won’t... he won’t say anything... he wouldn’t, like, come up to us or anything, would he?”
“I don’t think so,” I say. “I, um, I already talked to him.” “What?”
I nod. “Just now.” “Down here?” she asks. “Yeah.”
She shakes her head. “Whoa. Can you tell me—never mind, you can tell me about that later. Let’s go.”
I nod again and let her take me by the hand and lead me upstairs.
“He’s gone,” I say, as we turn the corner at the top of the stairs and the tables come into view.
“Good,” Bernadette says. “Come on.”
Y
ou never thought you’d be a cheater.
“We have to stop,” you told Erik the last time. It’s been over for weeks now, but you will never be clear of him, of it. And now you walk along Queen Street with Lucas, pop- ping in and out of the tiny galleries that have been sprouting up there, places you both might get a start showing your work. The neighborhood is edgy, scruffy, and replete with
homeless people of the mentally ill variety.
“Art and the mentally unstable,” Lucas says. He is hold- ing your hand and smiling at the spring sunshine. “It’s an appropriate mix, don’t you think?”
You laugh and he leans in to kiss your cheek and you blink at the pain his sweetness causes.
You have to leave him. You don’t want to, but you are false. False, false, false—you don’t deserve him.
But you keep giving yourself one more week, one more day, another hour before you have to do it. You keep hoping to wake up to it all being okay.
You ought to know, just by looking at your parents, that it will never all be okay. Once you are damaged, once you are compromised, there is no way back to the way you were, no retrieval, no healing, nothing but a struggle to keep going.
But one more day cannot be too much to ask.
Especially a crisp, shiny, fresh spring day where you have love in one hand, a steaming latte in the other, and the dream of a bright future filling your eyes.
But evening comes, and dinner with Lucas’s parents comes, and the half-brother Lucas hates comes to dinner.
And he is... he is...
ohfuckohfuckohfuck... Erik.
Erik, the first son of Lucas’s mother. The one you’ve heard about, the kid whose father took him from his estranged wife when Erik was four and moved from state to state, eluding the authorities. The one who ran away from his dad, got arrested for breaking into a variety store and spent a year with abusive foster parents before coming to live, at age ten, with his mother, stepfather, and little brother, Lucas. Lucas, whose perfect suburban life he un- doubtedly resented. Lucas, who he bullied and tormented and who therefore has, even at twenty-one, no pity for Erik’s hardship and no patience for his repentance.
“Nice to meet you,” you say, and shake his hand, which is sweating. Erik’s hands don’t usually sweat.You try to banish your knowledge of him, pretend to yourself that he is new. Your face is hot. You order a Bloody Mary and drink it too fast.
Lucas and his parents are tense, but it has nothing to do with you. You hope. Somehow you survive the evening.
You survive the walk home with Lucas and his ranting and raging about his parents trying to force him to accept Erik, whom he does not consider a brother, into his life.
Despite your guilt, you can’t help feeling impatient with Lucas for his intractability, his judgment, his lack of forgive- ness for someone who had a nightmare of a childhood.
“And then,” Lucas is saying as he stomps back and forth in front of your bed, “then he had the nerve to show up here six months ago and tell me he wanted to start fresh! To... what was it he said... to make amends and forge a new relationship, to be real brothers!”
“You never told me,” you say.
“This is a guy who made my life hell for years! He’s not worth our time, Mara.”
“But.. .”
“I told him where he could shove his fucking amends,” Lucas continues. “I said to him: you’ll never change, you’re the same loser you’ve always been, and you’re lucky anyone in our family lets you near us. But I don’t have to. I might have to help you get a job, but only because our mother begged me to. I don’t have to love you or like you or forgive you.”
“You helped him get a job?”
“Yeah, at school. I’m not even sure what he ended up doing.”
You retreat inward, fighting horror.
Sex is worse than usual that night, but if you have to grit your teeth and fake orgasm and every touch feels like a viola- tion, it’s your own fault.
6
5:55 a.m.: double espresso. 6 a.m.: painting.
I have five hundred dollars left in my bank account, bills to pay, and no credit cards, lines of credit, or surprise inher- itances coming in.
I’m fucked, but I must keep working or I will lose all sense of purpose. As it is, whether Hugo is here or not, I’m not sleeping well.
I feel like I’m painting with my eyes shut these days, because I disappear as I work. I have given up on geometrics and am painting whatever I feel like.
The face of Lucas appears in many places—in the shadow of an abstract door, in waves crashing onto a shore of purple sand—and when I sleep, I dream of him.
I sleep with Hugo, and dream of Lucas.
And in the waking light before dawn, sometimes I still want Erik.
Dad comes home from treatment and we have a talk during which he seems almost normal—balanced, practical, aware of his personal pitfalls. Shauna is never far, and I hope she’ll do as she promised and stay with him.
“And how are you?” Dad asks, holding both of my hands in his.
In the four seconds it takes me to breathe in and out, I’ve dismissed the thought of any answer but, “Fine.”
“Good,” he says, taking me at my word.
H
ugo is staring at me.
He’s been staring for many long minutes, while the only sound has been of my retching into the bedroom garbage can.
I’ve done it.
I shoved him so hard he went flying off the bed and landed on the floor, cracking his elbow on the bedside table on his way down. There’ll be a bruise.
He had no warning, but I did. I should have known.
My skin, all at once, is like an open wound, my insides a battlefield. There is no thought to trace it to, no moment of warning before it happens, and yet I should have known I would not be able to do this.
No matter that my heart begs, my body will not let me love. Hugo assures me he’s okay. But I know he is reconfigur- ing me, taking me apart and reassembling me with a new